Economics is Not about Life

The danger of economics and business...

Simple Wisdom

Wisdom to live by.

Celebrate life in all its glory. Be Present...

Life Happens

I meant to do my work today
But a bird sang in the apple tree,
And a butterfly flitted across the field,
And all the leaves were calling me,
And the wind went sighing over the land,
Tossing the grasses to and fro,
And a rainbow held out its shiny hand -
So, what could I do but laugh and go?

Don't be so tied up to your routines.

Take a moment to savor the beauty around you.

When life calls, respond spontaneously and be happy.

Be present, be here and be alive!!

R U OK Day

Today, Australia has launched the "R U OK" day.

It is to highlight the many cases of suicides that had occurred over the years.

The intent is to prevent anyone from considering suicide by just being concerned about the people around you, by just asking a sincere question of how they are doing.

A simple question like "R U OK" and just taking the time to be present and listen to them would perhaps be the very thing that a depressed person needs to stop him from taking the drastic step of ending his life.

So, take a minute to ask your friends, family and acquaintances if they are OK. Be genuinely interested in them and really be there for them.

Help your fellow man and prevent the senseless loss of a beautiful human being from taking their own life.

Life is beautiful - live it fully.

16 Truths That Make Us Strong

1. Life is not easy. – Hard work makes people lucky – it’s the stuff that brings dreams to reality. So start every morning ready to run farther than you did yesterday and fight harder than you ever have before. (Read The Road Less Traveled.)

2. You will fail sometimes. – The faster you accept this, the faster you can get on with being brilliant. You’ll never be 100% sure it will work, but you can always be 100% sure doing nothing won’t work. So get out there and do something! Either you succeed or you learn a vital lesson. Win – Win.

3. Right now, there’s a lot you don’t know. – The day you stop learning is the day you stop living. Embrace new information, think about it and use it to advance yourself.

4. There may not be a tomorrow. – Not for everyone. Right now, someone on Earth is planning something for tomorrow without realizing they’re going to die today. This is sad but true. So spend your time wisely today and pause long enough to appreciate it.

5. There’s a lot you can’t control. – Wasting your time, talent and emotional energy on things that are beyond your control is a recipe for frustration, misery and stagnation. Invest your energy in the things you can control.

6. Information is not true knowledge. – Knowledge comes from experience. You can discuss a task a hundred times, but these discussions will only give you a philosophical understanding. You must experience a task firsthand to truly know it.

7. You can’t be successful without providing value. – Don’t waste your time trying to be successful, spend your time creating value. When you’re valuable to the world around you, you will be successful. (Read Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?)

8. Someone else will always have more than you. – Whether it’s money, friends or magic beans that you’re collecting, there will always be someone who has more than you. But remember, it’s not how many you have, it’s how passionate you are about collecting them. It’s all about the journey.

9. You can’t change the past. – As Maria Robinson once said, “Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.” You can’t change what happened, but you can change how you react to it.

10. The only person who can make you happy is you. – The root of your happiness comes from your relationship with yourself. Sure external entities can have fleeting effects on your mood, but in the long run nothing matters more than how you feel about who you are on the inside.

11. There will always be people who don’t like you. – You can’t be everything to everyone. No matter what you do, there will always be someone who thinks differently. So concentrate on doing what you know in your heart is right. What others think and say about you isn’t all that important. What is important is how you feel about yourself.

12. You won’t always get what you want. – As Mick Jagger once said, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you might find you get what you need.” Look around. Appreciate the things you have right now. Many people aren’t so lucky.

13. In life, you get what you put in. – If you want love, give love. If you want friends, be friendly. If you want money, provide value. It really is this simple. (Read The Four Agreements.)

14. Good friends will come and go. – Most of your high school friends won’t be a part of your college life. Most of your college friends won’t be a part of your 20-something professional life. Most of your 20-something friends won’t be there when your spouse and you bring your second child into the world. But some friends will stick. And it’s these friends – the ones who transcend time with you – who matter.

15. Doing the same exact thing every day hinders self growth. – If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep getting what you’re getting. Growth happens when you change things – when you try new things – when you stretch beyond your comfort zone.

16. You will never feel 100% ready for something new. – Nobody ever feels 100% ready when an opportunity arises. Because most great opportunities in life force us to grow beyond our comfort zones, which means you won’t feel totally comfortable or ready for it.

And remember, trying to be someone else is a waste of the person you are. Strength comes from being comfortable in your own skin.

- Extracted From Transitioning.org

Life is Sacred

The world is facing many challenges as the 2010 draws to an end.

There are climate change, inequality, poverty and starvation, religious and ideological persecutions, mass migrations and war.

How did we end up in this reality?

Perhaps, it is because each of us, individually, is so caught up in our selfish and relentless pursuit of happiness.

This is manifested by our need to accumulate material things, in the greed that we see in Wall Streets and in our desperation to keep up with the Jones next door.

Faced with the clear consequences of our choices, many of us justify our decisions and increase our denial by saying that there is little that we can do to change the world.

That is not true!

Each of us have to step up to save the world. We have to start seeing that everything in life is sacred, each with its own holiness.

It starts with each of us making crucial changes in our attitudes and behaviors, through being open to our spiritual selves, supporting and encouraging each other.

We have to begin seeing all of life as sacred, starting with ourselves and our fellow human beings. It also extends to other species and the very planet earth itself.

Respecting and protecting the gift of life unconditionally is an inclusive path. It does not reject people who are different from us, who have different values from us or with ways of living different from us.

There are no excuses of violence and social injustice like racism or misogyny.

It is a path of love where we appreciate our own gift of life.

So start today. Begin with yourself by resolving to appreciate all that life is manifesting in front of us.

Make little steps to practise compassion and to love all sentient beings.

The Purpose of Life

I believe that the very purpose of life is to be happy.

From the very core of our being, we desire contentment.

In my own limited experience I have found that the more we care for the happiness of others, the greater is our own sense of well-being.

Cultivating a close, warm-hearted feeling for others automatically puts the mind at ease. It helps remove whatever fears or insecurities we may have and gives us the strength to cope with any obstacles we encounter.

It is the principal source of success in life. Since we are not solely material creatures, it is a mistake to place all our hopes for happiness on external development alone.

The key is to develop inner peace.

~ His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

Life's A Mess...

Life’s a mess. You are not entitled to expect anything from it.

Life is not fair. Everything does not balance out in the end.

Life happens, and you have no control over it. Good and bad things happen to you day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment. Your degree is a poor armour against fate.

Don’t expect anything. Erase all life expectancies.

Just live.

Your life is over as of today. At this point in time, you have grown as tall as you will ever be, you are physically the fittest you will ever be in your entire life and you are probably looking the best that you will ever look. This is as good as it gets. It is all downhill from here. Or up. No one knows.


What does this mean for you? It is good that your life is over.

Since your life is over, you are free. Let me tell you the many wonderful things that you can do when you are free.

The most important is this: Do not work.

Work is anything that you are compelled to do. By its very nature, it is undesirable.

Work kills. The Japanese have a term “Karoshi”, which means death from overwork. That’s the most dramatic form of how work can kill. But it can also kill you in more subtle ways. If you work, then day by day, bit by bit, your soul is chipped away, disintegrating until there’s nothing left. A rock has been ground into sand and dust.

There’s a common misconception that work is necessary. You will meet people working at miserable jobs. They tell you they are “making a living”. No, they’re not. They’re dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, harmful.

People will tell you that work ennobles you, that work lends you a certain dignity. Work makes you free. The slogan “Arbeit macht frei” was placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps. Utter nonsense.

Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing something you hate so that you can spend the small remainder sliver of your life in modest comfort. You may never reach that end anyway.

Resist the temptation to get a job. Instead, play. Find something you enjoy doing. Do it. Over and over again. You will become good at it for two reasons: you like it, and you do it often. Soon, that will have value in itself.

So what should you do? You will find your own niche. I don’t imagine you will need to look very hard. By this time in your life, you will have a very good idea of what you will want to do. In fact, I’ll go further and say the ideal situation would be that you will not be able to stop yourself pursuing your passions. By this time you should know what your obsessions are. If you enjoy showing off your knowledge and feeling superior, you might become a teacher.

Find that pursuit that will energise you, consume you, become an obsession. Each day, you must rise with a restless enthusiasm. If you don’t, you are working.

Most of you will end up in activities which involve communication. To those of you I have a second message: Be wary of the truth.

I’m not asking you to speak it, or write it, for there are times when it is dangerous or impossible to do those things. The truth has a great capacity to offend and injure, and you will find that the closer you are to someone, the more care you must take to disguise or even conceal the truth. Often, there is great virtue in being evasive, or equivocating. There is also great skill. Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence.

In order to be wary of the truth, you must first know it. That requires great frankness to yourself. Never fool the person in the mirror.


I have told you that your life is over, that you should not work, and that you should avoid telling the truth. I now say this to you: Be hated.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. Do you know anyone who hates you? Yet every great figure who has contributed to the human race has been hated, not just by one person, but often by a great many. That hatred is so strong it has caused those great figures to be shunned, abused, murdered and in one famous instance, nailed to a cross.

One does not have to be evil to be hated. In fact, it’s often the case that one is hated precisely because one is trying to do right by one’s own convictions.

It is far too easy to be liked, one merely has to be accommodating and hold no strong convictions. Then one will gravitate towards the centre and settle into the average. That cannot be your role. There are a great many bad people in the world, and if you are not offending them, you must be bad yourself. Popularity is a sure sign that you are doing something wrong.

The other side of the coin is this: Fall in love.

I didn’t say “be loved”. That requires too much compromise. If one changes one’s looks, personality and values, one can be loved by anyone.

Rather, I exhort you to love another human being. It may seem odd for me to tell you this. You may expect it to happen naturally, without deliberation. That is false.

Modern society is anti-love. We’ve taken a microscope to everyone to bring out their flaws and shortcomings. It far easier to find a reason not to love someone, than otherwise. Rejection requires only one reason. Love requires complete acceptance. It is hard work – the only kind of work that I find palatable.

Loving someone has great benefits. There is admiration, learning, attraction and something which, for the want of a better word, we call happiness. In loving someone, we become inspired to better ourselves in every way. We learn the truth worthlessness of material things. We celebrate being human. Loving is good for the soul.

Loving someone is therefore very important, and it is also important to choose the right person. Despite popular culture, love doesn’t happen by chance, at first sight, across a crowded dance floor. It grows slowly, sinking roots first before branching and blossoming. It is not a silly weed, but a mighty tree that weathers every storm.

You will find, that when you have someone to love, that the face is less important than the brain, and the body is less important than the heart.

You will also find that it is no great tragedy if your love is not reciprocated. You are not doing it to be loved back. Its value is to inspire you.

Finally, you will find that there is no half-measure when it comes to loving someone. You either don’t, or you do with every cell in your body, completely and utterly, without reservation or apology. It consumes you, and you are reborn, all the better for it.

Don’t work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone.

- Extracted from the speech given by Adrian Tan to the graduating class of 2008.

Everything Is About Feelings

"The Best And Most Beautiful Things In The World

Cannot Be Seen Or Even Touched.

They Must Be Felt With The Heart."

Helen Keller

These days, we live in a mindless way.

We have our goals and objectives to meet. We set our schedules and a list of things to do for the day and results that we have to accomplish. We rush through the day.

In doing so, we forget the rhythm of life. We let the passing seasons go by without really appreciating the beauty and the transient state of time.

Finding one's rhythm is difficult to do amidst all the pressures and expectations from the world outside.

We work too hard, we force things to go according to our plan.

Perhaps, it would be better to find the flow of life. Find the rhythm that fits you.

Find your life flowing in a seamless harmony around you. Be spontateous, powerful and present.

Feel it - the beauty, the resonance and every aspects of life.

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